Sat Sep 8 15:43:51 EEST 2018

On immortality in computer games

On immortality in computer games
When I younger so much younger than today I was playing with computer
games in unorthodoxal way. Instead of playing the game like a user, I
changed the games so the player was immortal. Maybe more precisely the
player had infinite number of lives.
In short the process was: analyze the code and change features you
don't like, like finishing the game because of death. In some sense
this was immortality in the game.
Per rough memory there were several types of immortality
(1) Instant free rebirth, starting from the beginning of the level
(2) No way to die
optionally
(3) Super natural skills like passing thru walls, including exiting
the screen from right and appearing on the screen from the left.
The hardware was Правец 82 (the socialist cloning of Apple II):
8 bit processor 6502, about 64Kb memory, including video memory and
ROM.
My "customers" were the colleagues of my father, engineers and
professors. They reached the end of a patched game and the game told
them: "You are very skilled and win monetary award, call #american
number". They didn't call, partially because the game was pirated.
Similar stuff appears in science fiction.
Implementing this in Internet Of Things will make great mess, it is
just a matter of time.

Sun Jul 1 19:00:40 EEST 2018

coverity scan of qmail -- 53 potential defects
(with false positives)

coverity scan of qmail -- 53 potential defects (with false positives)
coverity is commercial static source code analyzer accepting some
open source projects for free.
Did a scan of djb's qmail, the results are at:
https://scan.coverity.com/projects/qmail
the tool gave only 53 defects. Quick scan suggests that the non-false
positives are logically dead code or file race conditions (might be wrong about this).
to access the defects, you will need coverity account (free,
captchas).
djb is giving monetary bounty for qmail, owing me a bounty he couldn't
reproduce because of lack of virtual memory on old freebsd ;)

Tue Jun 12 12:51:05 EEST 2018

Are `su user' and/or `sudo -u user sh' considered
dangerous?

Are `su user' and/or `sudo -u user sh' considered dangerous?
Per vague memory I discussed half of this with some linux crowd and
they said "won't fix" long ago.
`su user' and `sudo -u user sh' give the user the fd of root's tty
and it is readable and writable. After closing the session, the
user can keep it and on root's tty potentially do:
1. inject keypresses via ioctl()
and/or
2. read the output of root's tty, probably with some analogue of
tee(1).
Is this really a concern?
Any workarounds?

Wed Jun 6 16:20:52 EEST 2018

Near death experience

Near death experience
Long ago I have lost consciousness. According to the doctors' logs
have been very close to death. To my surprise I have memories about
this time: Flying in a tunnel with very strange lights and everything
was super calm. Never saw such lights even in computer games. The
closest of one of lights is the light of eyes examination with light
source and pupils widened.
Wikipedia has a page "Near death experience". Looks like establishment
science has some interest in this stuff, lol.